Comes The Millennium

Is This The End, Or A New Beginning?

(remember, Change Is Good.)

February 18, 1996|By William Ecenbarger, a free-lance writer.

It's bearing down on us at the rate of 3,600 seconds per hour-the most important tear of the calendrical page in a thousand years; that magic moment when the cosmic odometer comes up with three zeroes; Father Time's big day; Christianity's horological cul-de-sac; a chronological, coinstantaneous, quadruple mind-blower: new year, new decade, new century, new millennium!

It's 996 years down, four to go.

Since part of the world began measuring time by years Anno Domini, it's a milestone that has been reached only once before-50 generations ago in the year 1000.

And never mind that the epochal event will occur in the middle of the year 5760 according to Judaic reckoning, and in the year 1420 for the world's Muslims.

Actually, it's a non-event, a figment of the imagination, less than a blip in a wink, a snowstorm in a glass paperweight, future schlock, right up there with crystal balls, tea leaves and goat innards as an indication of anything.

Yet few of us will escape the maelstrom. Already, wild-eyed airport evangelists with dog-eared Bibles are haranguing passersby, hawking salvation, warning that the end is nigh and raising a whole spook show of coming terrors.

All manner of cranks have their alarm clocks set for Dec. 31, 1999, have affixed crabby, paranoiac bumper stickers and are braying that the Oklahoma City bombing is proof that the Millennium is coming.

To the pa-paaa of trumpets, opportunistic entrepreneurs are catching the millennial wave, and competition is already keen in the Year 2000 Market. A tsunami of new books approaches with titles beginning "The Coming of . . ." "The Twilight of . . ." and "The Crash of . . . ."

From Vatican City to Orange County, Calif., plans are afoot for the biggest, gee-whiz, knockout, wowie Christmas blowout the world has ever seen, and one can only imagine the halftime show for Super Bowl XXXIV.

It's all very different from the last Millennium.

What was it like the last time it was the last time, when DCCCCLXXXXIX became just M? Most of the Christian world believed that the coming of the new Millennium meant the Apocalypse, the Day of Wrath, when all the world would dissolve into ashes.

Well before the fateful day, monks stopped copying sacred texts, peasants sought refuge in their lords' castles, farmers did not plan for the next year's crops, the rich gave away their belongings, thousands made pilgrimages to

Jerusalem, and others went to Rome to be at St. Peter's where Pope Silvester II said mass on New Year's Eve, 999.

In his book "A.D. 1000: Living on the Brink of Apocalypse," Richard Erdoes says the Pope "stood motionless, arms upraised," as he concluded mass at exactly midnight before a congregation dressed in sackcloth and ashes.

"When the fatal hour struck," Erdoes writes, "the crowd remained transfixed, barely daring to breathe, not a few dying from fright, giving up their ghosts then and there, according to one account. But when the moment passed and the earth did not open to swallow church and worshipers, and when no fire fell from heaven, all stirred as if awakening from a bad dream. Then amid much weeping and laughing, husband and wife, servant and master embraced. Even unreconciled enemies hailed each other as friends and exchanged the kiss of peace, and the bells of every church on the Seven Hills of Rome began to ring as with a single voice. The bitter cup had passed, the ancient chroniclers relate, and the world was reborn."

Of course, the failure of Christ to reappear on the Day of Judgment threw theologians and laity alike into confusion for decades.

What followed was a rough Millennium for Christian unity. It had barely begun when the Catholics split into Roman and Orthodox rites in 1054. Then came the Reformation five centuries later, followed by the continual splintering of Protestant churches. Today there are more than 2,500 Christian denominations.

Yet there are millions of Americans who claim to hear the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen and believe that Christ will come to begin his millennial reign in just a few years. They are aided and abetted by televangelists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggert, who preach that the Bible is a road map of history and have cooked up dire apocalyptic scenarios.

They find proof in the Midwestern floods of 1993, the World Trade Center bombing, the AIDS epidemic. The broader the devastation, the more plausible it seems to them.

David Koresh, the psychopathic leader of the Branch Davidians, was intrigued by the Book of Revelation, where the strongest scriptural evidence of the Millennium is found. To his ill-fated cult, events seemed to be happening according to divine plan: Demonic agencies of worldly power were persecuting and threatening to destroy them. A lawyer for the cult said on the morning the federal agents charged the Waco compound, "Some of the very religious people thought it was the last day of the world."